you readin' him about
Stocks, Alf?'

'No; it was all about fightin' out there where the soldiers is gone--a
great long piece with all the lines close together and very hard words
in it. 'E give me 'arf a crown because I read so well. And 'e says the
next time there's anything 'e wants read 'e'll send for me.'

'That's good hearing, but I do think for all the half-crown--put it into
the kicking-donkey money-box, Alf, and let me see you do it--he might
have kept you longer. Why, he couldn't have begun to understand how
beautiful you read.'

'He's best left to hisself--gentlemen always are when they're
downhearted,' said Mr. Beeton.

Alf's rigorously limited powers of comprehending Torpenhow's special
correspondence had waked the devil of unrest in Dick. He could hear,
through the boy's nasal chant, the camels grunting in the squares behind
the soldiers outside Suakin; could hear the men swearing and chaffing
across the cooking pots, and could smell the acrid wood-smoke as it
drifted over camp before the wind of the desert.

That night he prayed to God that his mind might be taken from him,
offering for proof that he was worthy of this favour the fact that he
had not shot himself long ago. That prayer was not answered, and indeed
Dick knew in his heart of hearts that only a lingering sense of humour
and no special virtue had kept him alive. Suicide, he had persuaded
himself, would be a ludicrous insult to the gravity of the situation as
well as a weak-kneed confession of fear.

'Just for the fun of the thing,' he said to the cat, who had taken
Binkie's place in his establishment, 'I should like to know how long
this is going to last. I can live for a year on the hundred pounds
Torp cashed for me. I must have two or three thousand at least in the
Bank--twenty or thirty years more provided for, that is to say. Then I
fall back on my hundred and twenty a year, which will be more by that
time. Let's consider.

Twenty-five--thirty-five--a man's in his prime then,
they say--forty-five--a middle-aged man just entering
politics--fifty-five--"died at the comparatively early age of
fifty-five," according to the newspapers. Bah! How these Christians funk
death! Sixty-five--we're only getting on in years. Seventy-five is
just possible, though. Great hell, cat O! fifty years more of solitary
confinement in the dark! You'll die, and Beeton will die, and Torp will
die, and Mai--everybody else will die, but I shall be alive and k